2666 by Roberto Bolaño tr by Natasha Wimmer - review

Stephen Abell finds Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel unforgettable

By Stephen Abell

7:00AM GMT 23 Jan 2009

The first temptation might be to dismiss this wondrous novel as no more than cult fiction. It certainly has plenty of those qualities associated with cult status: it is posthumous, unfinished, written in a foreign language, postmodern, ultra-violent, dauntingly long, mysteriously (perhaps even meaninglessly) titled. And Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean author who died in 2003, is a suitably romantic figurehead, having turned to the “dangerous calling” of writing fiction late in life in order to support his family (and avoid penury from his poetry).

But 2666 is a major literary event. It is a supernovel comprising five sections, each capable of standing alone (as was Bolaño’s original idea, with one eye on the increased sales that would accrue). The first is the tale of four literary critics, who join together in search of a mysterious German writer called Benno von Archimboldi. Their search leads them to Santa Teresa, a city in northern Mexico, where they are entertained by the local intelligentsia (including a strange professor called Amalfitano, who hangs a geometry book outside his home so the wind could “see whether there was anything in it that might be of use”) and learn that hundreds of women have been murdered in the region over the last few years. The second part is an odd account of Amalfitano and his apparent nervous breakdown. The third focuses on an African-American writer called Quincy Williams, known to everyone as “Fate”, who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match.

The fourth section focuses in disturbing detail on the rapes and murders of the women (the effect, a combination of what might be called shock and bore). In pulpish paragraphs, it describes the remains of each victim (“the blows she’d received had destroyed her spleen”) and the police’s desultory attempts to find the person responsible. One suspect is a giant German named Klaus Haas, who could be, but probably is not, Archimboldi. In the final part, we learn of Archimboldi’s life as a German soldier in the Second World War and then as a writer wandering around the Mediterranean.

It is easy to see how this review could be no more than an (unsuccessful) attempt to précis the many stories that Bolaño has tried to tell here. In one way that would be appropriate, because the novel is also itself a compendium of summaries and anecdotes, dreams and letters, movie plots and novel extracts, monologues and conversations. For all its vast scope, 2666 contains plenty of terms synonymous with reduction: “in short”, “in a word”, “to all intents and purposes”, “the salient point is”, “put it this way”, “in plain speech”, “to put it plainly”. One facet of Bolaño’s prose is the simple presentation of narrative: describing the myriad events as they occur, without obvious structure. One axiom in the novel is that “the whole world is a coincidence” and this becomes a literary manifesto, a justification for free association, “a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with another in monstrousness”.

But with Bolaño nothing is simple. 2666 is also a deeply self-conscious work which concerns itself with the act of reading and writing (something almost every main character is seen doing at some stage). Literature is seen to be “a chaos that was a reflection of the world” and so the prose incorporates the acts of confused perception that exist in real life. For example, descriptions are expanded to include more than one likeness, to challenge their own definitiveness: “spoken as if from inside an old castle or a dungeon dug under the moat of an old castle”; a memory “circled in their guilty consciences like a ghost or an electric charge”.

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Borges once wrote that “there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless”. Bolaño uses this futility inherent in artistic creation as a means of dramatising the futility in the modern world (it is noticeable that the crimes in the novel are held to be “deaths from modernity”).

Later, the narrator observes that “semblance was an occupying force of reality”. Bolaño is fond of the ostentatiously awkward turn of phrase, the metaphor that draws attention to its own dissembling: “the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallised spiderwebs or the briefest crystallised vomitings”.

The final motto for 2666, though, might just be “everything in everything”. It is an exhaustive and inclusive testimony of the world seen through its author’s eyes. It is both notably realistic (Santa Teresa is based on Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city in which hundreds of women have indeed disappeared without explanation) and elaborately inventive. It is an important development in the novel form and an unforgettable piece of writing that will resonate for years to come. And the title? Well, one theory points to 2666 years as the biblical time between Adam and Exodus. There is plenty of desert wandering in the novel but Bolaño’s final testament seems to be that there is no sight yet of the promised land.